What’s Left 4: We Need a Real Minimum Wage

college tuition | Ted Rall's Rallblog

            When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns—the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they’re employed, low wages—consistently come in first, so much so that they can’t imagine saving for the future. General economic issues like poverty, hunger and homelessness come in next. In a capitalist country with decades of rising income inequality and a modest safety net, these findings come as little surprise.

            The rent is too damn high; buying a house gets more and more out of reach. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, expenses rise faster than salaries, and bosses, who can fire you at will even if you’ve been working hard and following the rules, have absolute power in a country where 10% of workers belong to a union. No wonder we’re worried sick.

            Economic insecurity is America’s biggest political issue. Yet neither of the major parties campaigns on it. At most, they’ll refer to it obliquely, as when nativists call for reduced immigration—sometimes they argue that new arrivals take away jobs from the native-born.

            Many of the other things that keep people up at night are partly or fully grounded in economic insecurity. Crime and violence are more pervasive in poor neighborhoods, courts are better-staffed and more efficient in wealthy areas. Patients worry about being able to afford to see a doctor and pay for medications at least as much as they do about the quality of healthcare. Racial tensions dissipate in places and periods of prosperity.

            The failure of bourgeois electoral democracy to address the nation’s biggest political issue, economic insecurity, is tailor-made for the agenda of the Left, which historically has been grounded in Marxist class analysis.

            Naturally, the ultimate goal of Leftists is the overthrow of capitalism, which centers inequality and monopoly as inevitable at best and laudable at worst, with a socialism that provides equal access to the basic necessities of life and equal opportunity to achieve more. But Revolution is not like a cake; there is no recipe to follow. All the conditions must be ripe and, frustratingly to the revolutionist, the determination that those conditions exist can only be affirmed after the fact of success.

            One predicate for revolution is a well-organized grassroots movement. There are few better ways to build such a structure than to consistently and relentlessly agitate for improvement in people’s economic living conditions—which are, after all, their biggest problem—in elections, street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, sabotage and other militant actions centered around a Left programme that demands improvements in wages, benefits and government safety-net programs.

            Never has the public been more predisposed to the argument that government ought to intercede on behalf of those who are having trouble making ends meet, or fear that unemployment might put them into such a position. People’s buying power has been ravaged by inflation, corporations are again turning the screws after a brief period of liberalization driven by the post-pandemic labor shortage, and it has been 60 years since a major party proposed a federal anti-poverty program (LBJ’s Great Society).

            Some bourgeois political analysts, particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, identify the vacuum in the dialogue space of economic injustice. But neither party can meaningfully address issues like poverty and homelessness for one simple reason: they are capitalist parties. Whatever room existed for the reformist impulse vanished after the postwar period yielded to the beginning of America’s late-capitalist decline. Admitting that capitalism leaves millions behind is unthinkable, let alone developing legislative attempts to fix the problem.

            We, the Left, have the signature issue of economic justice all to ourselves, provided that we do not obsess over identity politics to the exclusion of class divisions.

            Wages come first.

            A day’s work should pay enough to pay for rent, a car and other necessities. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1970, it would currently be $30 an hour. The average worker is twice as productive as 1970, so make that $60. For a full-time worker, that’s $120,000 a year. But 1970 wasn’t a perfect time for workers. We deserve and demand better. The Left should think of $60 an hour as the bare minimum necessary to live decently in the United States, and push for more for skilled labor.

            Think that’s unrealistic? If so, you’ve been corrupted by capitalistic propaganda that devalues labor. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are still struggling to raise the federal minimum from $7.25 to $15.00—that’s what passes for progressive! What a joke! The bosses themselves consider $60 an hour to be the real minimum wage to subsist in the world we live in today; in New York, where I live, you can’t qualify for a rental apartment unless your annual salary is 40 times the monthly rent. You need $120,000 to be considered for a $3000 per month apartment; good luck finding anything for less than that. It’s not that landlords want to discriminate against working-class tenants. They’ve learned from experience that people who earn less than $120,000 are far likelier to fall behind on the rent until they have to be evicted, costing building owners and managers money.

            Be reasonable. Demand the impossible: $60 an hour minimum wage.

            Next: the Left’s programme for economic security.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Here’s What a Progressive Platform Looks Like

           “Be realistic. Demand the impossible.” —Situationist slogan, 1968.

            Demand #1: The $30-per-hour Minimum Wage.

            Not phased in over so many years that today’s $30 is worth $20 by the time it takes effect. $30 an hour for all workers, no exceptions, now. This is an eminently reasonable demand. If anything, it’s too little to ask. $7.25 is a sick joke. Congress’ abdication of its moral duty to reward American workers for their extraordinary productivity by increasing the minimum wage at or faster than inflation has eroded the base salary since the Vietnam era. Corporate profits have soared as workers’ wages have stagnated.

The federal minimum wage was $1.60 in 1968. Adjusting for the official inflation rate, that’s $30.00 today. Let’s party like it’s 1968.

Demand #2: Free national healthcare.

Not market-based, not a hybrid—we need real, actual, universal healthcare. Every nurse and every doctor becomes a federal employee. Health insurance vanishes as a business sector. Every check-up, every test, every doctor’s visit, every medication, every surgical procedure is fully covered, no questions asked, as long as it’s approved by a physician.

This is not too much to ask. Germany, where only 0.5% of the population is uninsured, pays only 10.7% of GDP for healthcare, compared to 16% here in the U.S. Norway, where hospitals are operated by the government, has a $210 per citizen per year deductible after which the government picks up the tab for everything; like Germany, overall healthcare costs in Norway are about 60% of ours.

Throw in dental, vision and mental health.

Demand #3: Slash military spending by 80%.

We’re not the world’s policeman. We’re its deranged serial killer. The U.S. squanders $800 billion a year to invade, occupy, assassinate, intimidate and bomb people who mean us no harm and destroy their infrastructure. That’s more than the next nine biggest-spending militarist nations combined. And those countries total 10 times our population.

Slashing the Pentagon budget would make the world safer. Fewer U.S. wars and proxy wars would reduce anti-Americanism and thus reduce the chance of another terrorist attack, save thousands of American lives and millions of people overseas, not to mention massively helping out the environment.

Those savings would easily cover

Demand #4: Free four-year college.

Young Americans have long been coerced into a devil’s bargain: without a college degree, they’ve been told, you won’t land a decent-paying job. College is insanely expensive so you’ll have to accept the burden of student loan debt. If you don’t make enough money after graduation due to bad luck or a bad economy or a changing workplace, too bad, you still have to pay. You can’t even discharge the loans in bankruptcy.

If the corporations who own our politicians require job applicants to have a college degree, a college degree should be free. 39 countries have free college. We deserve, and can afford, the same as Kenya, Iceland and Panama.

            Demand #5: Leadership to ban the most frightening weapons.

            As the world’s most aggressive militaristic nation and its biggest international arms dealer, only the U.S. has the standing and power to stop the arms races we’re starting. The U.S. should forswear its currently-stated, insane option of launching a nuclear first strike and invite all other nuclear powers to make the same commitment. It should join the 80% of the world’s nations that have pledged not to use landmines. It should ban drone-based weapons in its military, police and civilian sectors and demand that other nations do the same. The world must come together to ban lethal autonomous weapons; the U.S.’ early lead in this technology gives it leverage to lead the way.

            More to come.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Fight for Your Democratic Right to Be Ignored

Much of the Democratic campaign for the 2022 midterm elections centers around efforts by Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. If you love what the Democratic Party stands for, it’s an outrage. Not so much if you don’t.

Can’t Vote/Why Vote?

Republicans are obsessively trying to prevent Democrats, particularly blacks, from voting. Meanwhile, Democrats collect those votes but don’t work hard to represent their constituents on the issues that they care about.

Hold Them Accountable in 2040

Once again, Democrats are selling out their progressive voters. This time, Joe Biden says he’s not going to bother trying for a public option on the Affordable Care Act and there’s no sign of any attempt to increase the minimum wage. What will progressive voters do about it? If history serves, probably nothing.

Be the Lame Change You Seek

The corporate centrists who control the Democratic Party have a sneaky new tactic to keep progressives inside the tent: they pretend to propose radical change but don’t do anything to enact it.

We Give Joe Biden More Credit Than He Gives Himself

On issues like the drive to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, many Democratic defenders of President Biden indulge in magical thinking, pretending that he actually wants to get this done even though there is very little evidence that it’s on his agenda.

My Predictions for Biden’s Probably-Truncated Presidency

            Beginning in March 2016 I repeatedly and almost famously warned overconfident Democrats—who ridiculed me for saying so—that Donald Trump would probably win the 2016 election. Days after Trump’s “softly sensuous” inauguration I accurately predicted the next four years: “Three scenarios show us what everyday life in Trumpian America will probably feel like: Third World dictatorships, prison and having an alcoholic parent.”

            “In a dictatorship,” I noted, “particularly where the despot is a megalomaniac in the vein of a Saddam Hussein or a Muammar Gaddafi, citizens obsess over the Great Leader’s every move.” Never have the American people obsessed for four exhausting years over a president as we did over Trump and his autocratic style.

“People who have done time will tell you that it’s important to study the guards, particularly the sadistic ones.” Like prison inmates, we studied Trump and his tweets and his strange corrupt family incessantly in a vain attempt to isolate the methods to his multiple madnesses.

            As I concluded in January 2017: “It’s never fun to be Cassandra.”

            Now it’s time to weigh in on what Joe Biden’s first — and despite his recent statement to the contrary, almost certainly only — term will probably look like.

            Spoiler alert: it probably won’t last four years.

            There’s a reason candidate Biden barely campaigned and almost never spoke extemporaneously, and that President Biden has only given one highly cringy press conference so far, a record low in the modern era. Biden, 78, is the oldest man to have taken the oath of office. And while a lot of 78-year-olds are physically vigorous and mentally sharp, Biden isn’t one of them.

Biden’s cabal of Obama-era handlers are doing their best to hide their fading commander-in-chief and his obvious-to-all-non-Democrats infirmities, running the country from behind the scenes. His media allies have sacrificed their last vestige of dignity in their heroic support for the Dems’ ridiculous “nothing to see here” narrative.

            As professional gamblers evaluate the president’s health and political performance, posted odds that he’ll remain in office through January 19, 2025—when he’ll be 82—have already plunged from 75% to 60%. My guess is that no one is more aware of Biden’s condition than DNC bosses. They would like Biden to hang on until after the November 2022 midterm elections, then step aside in order to allow Vice President Kamala Harris a year of incumbency, which could bolster her case for 2024.

Biden can still read a speech. But he is a husk, a placeholder leader like Pope Benedict XVI, who like Biden became pope at age 78. Benedict resigned at age 85, citing old age.

Following Trump’s bipolar rule and violent departure from office, Biden’s courtly elder-statesman style and successful passage of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill has him enjoying high approval ratings. But failures of commission and omission lie ahead. It’s mostly downhill from here.

The next major item on the Biden Administration’s legislative agenda is a $2.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Until recently building stuff seemed like one of the few areas in which a bipartisan grand bargain might be possible. Now, however, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has united the GOP in opposition. With DINOs like Joe Manchin of West Virginia going wobbly, it seems destined for outright defeat or, worse because it only pretends to fix the issue, severe dilution.

Voters judge presidential success and failure on two metrics. First, did the president correctly identify the problems people care about most? Second, did they fix those problems or at least do their best to try?

In part because they listened to progressives, Biden’s people wisely put money into people’s pockets to help them recover from the economic pain of the COVID-19 lockdown. As checks arrive this month, voters will feel warm fuzzies for the Democrats. But it wasn’t nearly enough. What happens in two or three months? Those single $1400 payments, a tiny fraction of a whole year of fiscal pain, will be spent and gone. The eviction and foreclosure moratorium ends June 30th. There is no indication that the White House plans another relief package.

Look for a long hot summer as complacency deteriorates into despair.

Biden’s presidency will likely crash on the shoals of the country’s numerous long-neglected problems. Legislation to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour will be tepid to nonexistent. The same goes for student loan debt relief. Biden promised to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act but there’s no sign of life there either. He talks a good game on racial justice yet offers nothing by way of forced federal reform of local policing.

If I’m right, the second two years of the Administration will belong to Kamala Harris as of 2023.

She is young, charismatic and relatively energetic. She will make the most of her historical moment as the first woman of color to hold the nation’s highest political office; the media will be on her side. But if history repeats itself by punishing the party in power Democrats will likely lose seats in the House and control of the Senate in the midterms, leaving her in an even worse position to get anything done in Congress. Nevertheless, she’ll be a formidable candidate in 2024.

As befitted him, Trump went out with a bang.

Biden will end with a whimper.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the upcoming graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available for pre-order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

           

 

At Least Trump is Gone

Biden’s response to the insanely low minimum wage, the ongoing healthcare crisis and the millions of people and businesses destroyed by the COVID-19 recession has been anemic; his defenders insist Trump was worse. But we can’t say “Trump was worse” when the rent is due.

Got Guillotines?

Assuming the Democrats get their way, and that’s highly unlikely, their proposal for the minimum wage isn’t really for $15 an hour. It’s for $15 an hour eventually, four years or five years from now. And the Democrats seem to be about to give that up as it is. When it comes to not doing anything for the working class, there’s lots of bipartisanship.

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